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Impact of ageing on the brain regions of the schizophrenia patients: an fMRI study using evolutionary approach

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Abstract

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that results in adverse functional and biochemical changes in the brain. Although normal ageing significantly affects the brain of a person structurally as well as functionally, the functional activation pattern in the brain of a schizophrenia patient may change differentially with age. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first of its kind fMRI-based study to find the functional changes in the brain of schizophrenia patients associated with ageing. In this study, we aim to compare the age-related variations in the functional activation pattern in the brain of schizophrenia patients vis a vis the healthy controls. For this study, we have used 1.5T fMRI data of 60 subjects and 3T fMRI data of 50 subjects, having an equal number of schizophrenia and healthy subjects. We have split this dataset into multiple age-groups. We applied a three-stage methodology comprising the application of the general linear model, followed by statistical hypothesis testing, and a finally bi-objective NSGA-II algorithm for selection of relevant voxels. The proposed methodology yielded a set of relevant voxels in the brain that demonstrate the age related variations in activation patterns. Specifically, it revealed increased functional activations in elderly patients suffering from schizophrenia in multiple brain regions, mostly located in areas like frontal lobe, temporal lobe and parietal lobe as compared to the young schizophrenic patients. These findings may help in making decisions for differential clinical management of younger patients as compared to the elderly ones.

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Notes

  1. SPM8: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/software/spm8/

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research fellowship of Indranath Chatterjee from Council of Science and Industrial Research (CSIR), India having grant number 09/045(1323)/2014-EMR-I. Data used in this work are taken from the Functional Biomedical Informatics Research Networks (FBIRN) data repository, under the following support: for function data, U24-RR021992, Function BIRN and U24 GM104203, Bio-Informatics Research Network Coordinating Centre (BIRN-CC). The data were obtained from the Function BIRN Data Repository, Project Accession Number 2007-BDR-6UHZ1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Tongmyong University, Busan, 48520, South Korea

    Indranath Chatterjee

  2. Department of NMR and MRI Facility, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, 110029, India

    Virendra Kumar

  3. Department of Computer Science, Hans Raj College, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110007, India

    Bharti Rana & Manoj Agarwal

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110007, India

    Naveen Kumar

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  1. Indranath Chatterjee
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Correspondence to Indranath Chatterjee.

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This study did not require the ethics committee approval because it involves analysis of de-identified imaging data available from an open-source repository, which need not to do any further sampling or data collecting.

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Chatterjee, I., Kumar, V., Rana, B. et al. Impact of ageing on the brain regions of the schizophrenia patients: an fMRI study using evolutionary approach. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 24757–24779 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09183-z

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